Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03228-6 - Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society Gary Chartier Excerpt More information Introduction Embodying Freedom People cooperate peacefully and voluntarily when they interact without aggression.1 A just society, a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, is both possible and desirable.2 Because the state precludes and preempts this kind of cooperation, aggressing or threatening to engage in aggression against those who disobey it, a peaceful, voluntary society must be a stateless society—an anarchist society.3 The 1 By “aggression,” I mean, roughly, nondefensive, non-remedial harm to people’s bodies and nondefensive, nonremedial interference with their just possessory interests; see Chapter 2, infra. “Peace” as nonaggression is a necessary condition for peace in other, more elaborate senses, and it can reasonably be expected to promote peace in these senses. 2 Events and states of affairs are not proper subjects for moral evaluation, which is concerned with choice. Moral choices are made by particular people, even if in concert and cooperation with others. Thus, while it is possible to talk about a “just legal system” or even a “just society,” this kind of language is shorthand. A just institution is one that characteristically functions in accordance with reasonable choices by particular people. Similarly, to call a legal rule just is simply to say that someone can enforce the rule consistently without doing anything unjust. 3 I take a state to be, in roughly Weberian terms, an entity that claims, and exercises something reasonably like, a monopoly over the determination, adjudication, and enforcement of legal rights in a given geographic area. Thanks to Charles Johnson for emphasizing the importance of referring to legal rights here and to Heather Ferguson for stressing the need to clarify the meaning of “state” as I use it in this book. In the interests of convenience, I refer at various points to states as doing things; in reality, of course, states as such don’t do things—rather, particular people, engaged in certain kinds of cooperative activities and proceeding with the benefit of certain kinds of legitimation, do things in their roles as state actors, and it should be clear throughout I have the actions of such people in mind when I talk about state action. By “anarchy,” I do not, of course, mean chaotic violence but rather social order rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and so without the state. Cf. Patricia Crone, Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists, 167 Past & Present 3, 3 (2000) (referring to “anarchists in the simple sense of believers in an-archy, ‘no government’.”). While my primary focus here is on opposition to social order created and maintained by aggressive force, support for anarchy is naturally and intimately associated with opposition to social hierarchies maintained by nonaggressive means (see Charles W. Johnson, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? 155, 179–83 [Roderick T. Long and Tibor Machan eds., 2008]); as I argue in Chapter 6, ending institutionalized aggression and various complementary varieties of nonaggressive 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03228-6 - Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society Gary Chartier Excerpt More information 2 Introduction general character of the kind of legal and political order compatible with anarchy can be specified and justified in light of a plausible conception of what it means for people to live fulfilled, flourishing lives. Contemporary natural law theory offers such a conception. It incorporates both a rich and variegated understanding of human well-being and a set of principles that can guide our attempts to foster our own welfare and that of others—the Principle of Fairness, the Principle of Respect, and the Principle of Recognition (Chapter 1). People’s obligations to each other with respect to physical things are both sources of conflict and (while too frequently invoked to legitimize unjust privilege) useful guarantors of autonomy and sources of flourishing; just possessory claims serve to demarcate those interests people can reasonably defend using force from those they can’t—and, properly understood, they help to explain why the state is illegitimate. Rooted both in basic moral principles and in a set of desiderata derived from these principles and from truisms about human existence, these obligations, embodied in what I call the baseline possessory rules, can play a crucial instrumental role in fostering people’s welfare. However, while there are good reasons to respect people’s possessory interests in physical things, people often claim that they are entitled to treat other kinds of things as possessions. Though people often claim that other people or other sentients are among their legitimate possessions, arguments that our fellow sentients, human or nonhuman, are raw material we can use at our discretion are unconvincing. And the notion that someone can justifiably control how other people embody abstract ideas in their own legitimate possessions finds little support in a credible account of people’s just possessory claims. The strong prima facie presumption in favor of respecting people’s claims to their justly acquired physical possessions—those acquired in accordance with the baseline rules4—combined with everyone’s right not to be the object of purposeful, instrumental, or otherwise unreasonable physical attack, can be usefully summarized in the form of a maxim of nonaggression (Chapter 2).5 protest can reasonably be expected to lead to significant reductions in the frequency and influence of such hierarchies. 4 On just acquisition, see Chapter 2.IV, infra. To anticipate: just acquisition is acquisition in accordance with the baseline rules. Someone justly acquires a physical object if she takes effective possession of it when it is not justly claimed by anyone else, or when she receives it through voluntary transfer from another just possessor. 5 The natural-law approach to moral theory I take here combines something resembling an Aristotelian account of personal flourishing, a Kantian account of duties with respect to basic aspects of others’ well-being, and a Humean account of obligations with respect to others’ possessory claims. The understanding of the prohibition on violence against basic aspects of flourishing which the natural-law approach grounds is thus straightforwardly deontological, similar to that enshrined in the Formula of the End-in-Itself. By contrast, the account of possessory rules I defend has (as applied to institutional actors) obvious affinities with a sort of practice-consequentialism; while I do not believe that global or aggregating consequentialism is defensible, persons reasoning in accordance with the Principle of © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03228-6 - Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society Gary Chartier Excerpt More information Introduction 3 To reject aggression is to embrace a model of social interaction rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation. This kind of cooperation can occur without the state; it can be fostered effectively by a variety of nonaggressive social institutions, including, in particular, institutions upholding consensual legal rules, resolving disputes, and providing protection against aggression, which I’ll refer to as legal regimes.6 Unlike these institutions, the state is premised on the denial of human moral equality and is inimical to peaceful, voluntary cooperation (and the flourishing such cooperation facilitates) because of the state’s nonconsensual character and its inefficiency, destructiveness, rapacity, and penchant for aggression—especially in the service of elite groups (Chapter 3). The state is unjustified, illegitimate, and dangerous. But life without the state need not be thought of as organized purely on the basis of ad hoc cooperation or persistent social norms. There would be good reason for people in a stateless society to maintain just legal regimes. Such regimes (which might serve geographically localized or virtual and widely distributed networks of people) would of necessity be rooted in actual rather than implied or hypothetical consent; and even when they employed force against outlaws, they would be morally distinguishable from states in important ways (Chapter 4). Though different actual legal regimes in a stateless society would doubtless adopt different rules, the maxim of nonaggression and the prohibitions on violating people’s bodies and on interference with their possessory claims that underlie it provide a clear and intelligible framework for the legal rules it would be reasonable for just institutions in a stateless society to implement. A central role in maintaining justice and preventing aggression should be played by simple tort-law rules pre- cluding attacks on bodies and possessions and requiring compensation for injuries when such attacks occur. Such rules would leave no room for attempts to foster virtue using the force of law or to employ the law to prevent or end nonaggressive injuries—often important, but appropriately addressed by non-forcible means. Just legal rules enforced in a stateless society would not feature the separate category of crime, which

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